Into the Fire(114)

With a manicured finger, she compressed the intercom button on the hefty telephone before her. “Rolando,” she said. “We’re ready.”

Her assistant coasted in on a breeze of cologne, steel briefcase in hand. She’d dispensed with the handcuff. After the boys’ failure, there was no longer a need to indulge their egos.

Rolando delivered the briefcase and exited as crisply as he’d entered, the soundproofed door suctioning closed with a finality that seemed baldly symbolic. The room had a deflated feel, the men leaning back in their chairs bonelessly. The fun was over, and now there was nothing left except paranoia and the fear of exposure.

But if Stella was good at one thing, it was minimizing risk. She would cover their tracks. They would hibernate. And when the threat had been dispatched, they would reconstitute themselves, perhaps in a new iteration that had shed the deadweight. Once more they’d lodge themselves into the underbelly of the city like a tick. And they’d gorge.

The titanium latches snapped open with a robust click.

She lifted the briefcase lid.

At first she did not register what she was looking at.

How could she?

She lacked the expertise to identify blocks of C-4. More precisely, untraceable Detasheet devoid of coded microparticles.

Nor could she understand that the soundproofed conference-room door and commercial-grade Sheetrock designed for maximum privacy would also maximize the overpressure from the coming explosion.

Sitting in the chill conference room, feeling her flesh firm around her with a kind of inborn protectiveness, she found herself unable to formulate words for the first time in memory. Her left eyelid twitched, a ticklish flutter.

“What?” Fitz was shouting at her. “What is it?”

One of the boys knocked the briefcase. It swung around, on full display.

The comptroller lurched up from his chair, tangled in his neighbor, and fell over.

The act of opening the briefcase had initiated a five-second timer.

The digitally rendered numeral had already reached 2.

Now 1.

Bound together by a speechless terror, they watched the final second of their lives vanish off the board.





62



God or Fate or Whoever Runs the Universe





At midnight Evan’s doorbell rang.

He’d been lying on the floating bed, a cool washcloth resting across his eyes, the first hours of actual relief from the concussion pain he’d been able to get since Petro’s man had introduced the back of his skull to the asphalt.

There were no sheets, just the bare mattress. When he’d arrived home, he’d stared at them helplessly, overwhelmed by the muddy dog prints and stray hairs. Dispensing with any notion of cleaning them, he’d stripped them off the bed and launched them down the trash chute. He had more work to do mopping the floors and scrubbing the counters, but it would have to wait until he could stand for longer than five minutes without getting nauseated.

Besides, he had more important concerns. President Donahue-Carr’s pardon offer was still floating out there, and he had to claim his reward before it vanished.

He descended out of his breath meditation, eased off his floating bed, and walked down the hall, pleased to note that—for the moment—he felt normal.

Even before checking the security monitor, he knew it would be Mia.

What he didn’t know was what she’d say.

He opened the door, and they faced each other across the threshold. She wore an oversize sweater, her hands lost to the sleeves, arms crossed low on her stomach. He couldn’t read her face.

He sensed a new appreciation for how clear his head felt after his brief rest and how crisply he could see her. He wondered what life might feel like moving forward, injury-free and able to indulge simple pleasures. His right pupil remained slightly enlarged, but it was nowhere near as noteworthy as before, and it seemed to evade even Mia’s sharp attention.

“How’s Peter?” he asked.

“Shockingly good,” she said. “He asked me to pray with him tonight. And he said…” A quicksilver glimmer filled her eyes, and she tilted her head back and blinked several times. “He said, ‘Dear God or fate or whoever runs the universe. Thanks for sending help to me.’” She stared at Evan, her chin quivering. “What am I supposed to say to that?”

“I don’t know.”

“I didn’t tell anyone. That you were there. Who you are. I said they lured me to the hotel room and someone grabbed me and then gunfire broke out and I escaped.”

“All true,” he said. “Except I lured you to the room.”

She gazed at him, her eyes as large and vulnerable as he’d ever seen them. “As a DA you have to think in black and white. Or at least you get hammered into it. But it’s all a mess.” She shook her head, her chestnut curls swaying. “Either I’m wiser now or I’m a hypocrite. I’m not sure which.”

“Maybe they’re the same.”

“They had Peter,” she said. “They had Peter, and there were laws and oaths and procedures, and I didn’t care about any of them.” Now her cheeks were wet. “They had my son. And that made it different. What I wanted to happen. What I would have been willing to do. It was different.”

“Yeah, it is,” Evan said. “Every time.”